The editor of Elle magazine has claimed her two mixed-race children were branded “dirty negroes” by a racist thug in her native France.
Katell Pouliquen made the claim in an explosive Facebook and Instagram post, saying she had been in in Plérin, Brittany when a supermarket shopper made the racist slur.
Ms Pouliquen, 41, claims the man, aged in his 60s and with his “mute” wife, told her sons: “Get out of here, dirty negroes.”
She claimed the words felt like an “uppercut” and her account has caused a storm in France where tensions are high amid the rise of the far-right.
The editor said she had brought her children up knowing about black heroes like Martin Luther King and to believe their mixed race made them “two times richer, stronger and more beautiful”.
Quoting American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Letter To My Son, she wrote: “I feel the fear most acutely whenever you leave me. But I was afraid long before you, and in this I was unoriginal.
“When I was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid.”
“Which letter oo I write to my son?” she asked. “I'm angry. Violently. Adamantly.”
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